President Dallin H. Oaks's Remarks on Presentism and the Nauvoo Expositor

 

Figure 1[1]

Recently I submitted a review to the Interpreter Foundation for the BYU Religious Studies Center’s latest book, Joseph Smith and his First Vision: Context, Place, and Meaning with the intent that it might be published in their peer-reviewed journal. This is a wonderful addition to Latter-day Saint historical studies, and I look forward to sharing my review with the world in the coming months.

While I am waiting to hear back from the reviewers (it is not uncommon for this process to take a few months), I would like to share an interesting insight from President Dallin H. Oaks’s paper “Writing about the Prophet Joseph Smith.”[2]

President Oaks was one of the three keynote speakers from the 2020 Church History Symposium (from which this book draws its contents), and he has had a long career of publishing content related to the Church from his viewpoint as both a legal and Church history scholar.

His paper summarized many of his former writing projects related to the Prophet Joseph Smith throughout his life. The first he mentioned was also regarding one of the most misunderstood and (to a modern audience, at least) troubling acts of Joseph Smith – the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor press.

As a brief historical note (I recommend for a further introduction to the matter, one read Chapter 43 of the first volume of Saints), the Nauvoo Expositor was a newspaper that disparaged the character of Joseph Smith and other church leaders, believing them to have strayed from the restored gospel. The founders of this newspaper were all excommunicated previously and disaffected towards Joseph Smith, especially on account of plural marriage and Joseph’s sermons relating to the nature and being of God that challenged Protestant understanding. No stranger to mobs driving the saints from hearth and home and worried that the Expositor would cause the events of Missouri to repeat themselves in Illinois, Joseph Smith and the Nauvoo City Council sought legal guidance from the Illinois Constitution and other sources before deciding that, as a public nuisance, they could destroy all copies of the paper and the press of the Expositor, and so they did.

Many have criticized this decision as unconstitutional and a great violation of the freedoms presented therein, finding little room for Joseph Smith’s reasoning or time to influence their decision. However, as President Oaks points out, there is a lot more to this story that is often overlooked through the lenses of presentism, allowing modern readers to feel ashamed that such an act could ever occur while ignoring the laws and understanding of them in 1844.

President Oaks explains that his interest in this topic first began when he was reading the 1931 Supreme Court case Near v. Minnesota, the first case where the Supreme Court applied the Bill of Rights to reverse the action of a local state government. Central to this case was the suppression of a newspaper by government action.

Later, as an associate professor, President Oaks decided that he would write his first paper on the Expositor incident. President Oaks remarked regarding this effort:

In research for that article I learned that modern criticism of the action of the Nauvoo City Council has been based on the principle of freedom of speech and press embodied in the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution. However, that amendment was not adopted until twenty years after the Nauvoo suppression. The law in 1844, including interpretation of state constitutional guarantees of a free press, offered considerable support for what Nauvoo had done. Even in the similar circumstances of the newspaper suppressed in the famous case of Near v. Minnesota a unanimous Minnesota Supreme Court and four justices in the minority in the United States Supreme Court found no violation of the free press guarantee as understood up to that time. Consequently, my article concluded that “The common assumption of historians that the action taken by the [Nauvoo] city council to suppress the paper as a nuisance was entirely illegal is not well founded.”[3]

While criticism for this event still abounds on the internet ­and other sources, while it is likewise misunderstood in Sunday School and by those both in and out of the Church. It is often interesting and saddening for me to see unbound criticism towards Joseph’s difficult decision while nothing is said about the similar destruction of the Church-owned press in Missouri – an act that was clearly illegal and the effect of mob rule.[4]

Many of the issues that arise from this event, as President Oaks points out, stems from looking at historical events with presentism. When we point out the flaws and mistakes of past peoples based on modern laws and rules, we do history a great injustice. Joseph Smith did not live in 2021 when the action would be seen as illegal in every sense of the word, he lived in 1844 when there was a historical precedent and legal support for his actions.

Presentism, quite simply, is a lens I hope all people can learn to avoid like the plague (and with the COVID-19 pandemic nearing an end, we should all have great experience in doing just that), and as President Oaks has done and encouraged, seek mature understandings of historical events as historical rather than modern.

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[1] Nauvoo Expositor Destruction by Anthony Sweat.

[2] Dallin H. Oaks, “Writing about the Prophet Joseph Smith,” in Joseph Smith and his First Vision: Context, Place and Meaning, edited by Alexander L. Baugh, Steven C. Harper, Brent M. Rogers, and Benjamin C. Pykles (Provo, U: BYU Religious Studies Center / Salt Lake City: Deseret Book), 3-20. I was also pleased to find that the Church Newsroom has published President Oaks’s paper online.

[3] Oaks, “Writing about the Prophet,” 5.

[4] While I reference the events in Missouri, it should be noted there is a drastic legal separation between the destruction of the Evening and Morning Star and the Nauvoo Expositor presses. The destruction of the Nauvoo press was done through civic action that had legal support with nobody injured or targeted for any attack; the destruction of the Missouri press was done through mob action and mob rule, acting beyond the law and causing physical harm and danger to the lives of those involved, including tarring and feathering church leaders and burning their homes – including the home where the press was located. Mob rule has never been the rule of law, and burning philosophical, theological, or political enemies’ homes and causing harm to them or their families has never been legal in the United States of America.